I have an announcement to make that needs desperately to be said and heard.

A few hours ago, I was writing a ticket to Quora to delete this account immediately, without the typical two week grace period, along with all content associated with it. I was one moment from sending it.

And I was very tempted to do it. But if I had, I would have ran away, without saying these words that I need to say. And I owe these words to anyone I have failed.

In all my time in Quora, I have given myself one singular mission: to write history, with honesty, truth, and integrity. I have written many answers widely considered exceptional in pursuit of said goal. I have gained fame for strictly adhering to it. And in the past few days, I was confronted with the fact that I have failed.

I have written before on just how much I have come forward in all my years of writing on Quora, in every way, shape or form. Now, I write better, in every way that matters: with more nuance, more fact, less pointless spectacle, and less arrogance. However, my memory has never been particularly good, and I have only just come to realize just how much better I write today, or, more relevant to the topic, just how much worse I wrote years ago.

As you might have realized by the PSA that went up on my profile a few days ago, I decided to undertake a review process of my old answers. In doing so, I found myself well and truly horrified.

To put it with the brutal honesty I ought to, many of my earliest answers and comments are truly horrifying. Problems range across a wide spectrum of a very off-putting brand of arrogance, a very lackluster quality of writing, a not insignificant amount of historical errors, imprecise and flawed phrasing, and rarest but sadly worst of all, a few very questionable conclusions and opinions with some disturbing implications. I have found myself staring at answers and comments that I would mercilessly slam today had I seen them written by someone else.

But the most unsettling fact about those is the fact that this is content out there, under my name- a name that today has a reputation for accurate and well researched content. It is that reputation that today retroactively stands behind some content that is neither accurate nor well researched. Thus, it represents a catastrophic and unacceptable failure of my self-declared mission: the promotion of pure and unvarnished truth.

In the past, I had resolved to let such answers stand, as a reminder to myself of just how far I had come. But that was a decision taken before I realized that the only thing wrong about them wasn’t simply a quality of writing: a badly written answer that is otherwise true will not harm anyone. Factual errors, arrogant attitudes, or some implications this world is better off without are a completely different matter, mostly borne out of past ignorance or arrogance, ironic given my own contempt of those. A not insignificant amount of my past content, especially at the earliest of my writing, is a total betrayal of my current ideals. It’s not the majority of what turns me off today: most of that is simply true but poorly phrased, or pointless, cheap, short answers that don’t add anything to anyone. Most of the problematic answers are simply crude, single-sentence statements that don’t mean anything.

But there are things that I would never have written today, and shouldn’t have written back then, things I do not want backed by my name and reputation not just because they were written badly, but because they were wrong. It doesn’t matter they are nowhere near the majority of what needs to be gotten rid of. Even one such answer, even one that barely anyone ever saw, is too much.

I cannot accept this.

And this, above all, is why this account isn’t deleted, even though it would be a convenient and effective way of making sure that my name no longer gives legitimacy to my mistakes. Because I do not simply wish to bury my mistakes quietly and without a word. I wish to disown them. I wish for every one of my followers to know that I have discovered and recognized my failure, that I will correct it, and I will adhere to even stricter standards in the future so that it will not be repeated. Every single answer or comment or other piece of content that I manage to find that does not adhere to the standards I today hold myself to are in the process of deletion or major edits. I fully realize I won’t find everything, especially since there is no easy way to track comments and even if there were it would be a herculean effort. But I will do my best. It will take long, given my busy schedule, but I have already started, and I hereby disown and disavow any past statements made that do not fit my current standards of moral, neutral and accurate scholarship that I do not manage to find and terminate.

The truth, without varnish or embellishment or manipulation. This was my mission. In the distant past, I have failed it severely. I apologize humbly for having done so, and I state firmly that I will not do so again.

I thank you all, for the support you have shown me for so long, the trust you have placed in me, and the journey to more nuanced knowledge that you have helped me on. And I promise to hold myself to ever stricter standards and continue to provide the best within my power to provide. The errors of the distant past will be corrected, and will not be repeated.

Ad astra per aspera.

Simple. Because cancer is not a disease. Cancer is a group of more than a hundred diseases, many of which have as much in common with each other as a fruit fly does with a pigeon: after all, they both fly, no?

Put simply, ‘cancer’ means an abnormal, autonomous, continuous and invasive growth of cells. There are, without exaggeration, dozens of diseases and mechanisms that eventually result in the clinical picture we name cancer. In that regard, it’s as much a disease as a cough is: the end product of countless barely related diseases.

A cough can be the result of simple irritation, common cold, bacterial pneumonia, COPD, lung cancer, and a whole bunch of other things. None of these is treated with the same treatment as another. For the cancer, it works exactly the same. Let alone being able to treat all the root causes with a single treatment, we can’t even treat the resulting tumours with the same treatment for they can be radically different: radiotherapy, which is very effective against leukemias, is very ineffective on renal cell carcinomas.

I’m not even talking about treating the mechanism and the root cause: that causes only more divergence. Various types of cancers can be and are caused by a vast variety of things, including chemical exposure(vast majority of lung cancers), infections(Kaposi’s sarcoma), radiation exposure(many skin cancers), inherited mutations(Lynch syndrome), chronic inflammation(esophageal cancer), autoimmune diseases, hormonal diseases… and it’s rare for the cause to be one of these. Many cancers are caused by a complex algorithm of causes.

‘Cancer’ isn’t a disease. It’s an abstract group of over a hundred diseases that are so radically different from each other that they can only be cured individually. To expect a miracle one size fits all cure just because the end result of all cancers are somewhat similar when looked at very superficially is same as expecting the same treatment to work on both bacterial pneumonia and COPD because they both make you cough. That’s not how it works.

Not to mention, we can cure cancer. Not all cancers, and not always, but we have valid treatments for nearly every kind of cancer. They are imperfect, rough, and unpleasant, but they save lives. Many cancers caught at earlier stages can be cured permanently, with extremely low recurrence rates. Many cancers even at later stages can be feasibly put into remission, giving a patient years upon years of life that they would not have without modern medicine. Progress is being made.

There are people on this site old enough to remember the sixties. 1960’s- they’re not too far into history. It is not too far when leukemia used to be an absolute death sentence: where the five year survival rate measured barely above ten percent.

Today, approximately seven out of ten leukemia patients survive the first five years after their diagnosis. A not insignificant percentage of them achieve complete remissions and cures. Is the fight against leukemia over? Hell no, but it’s being won. Slowly, but it’s being won.

That’s how cancer is and will be cured. Not by some miracle treatment that within one day will make cancer a worry of the past: I would cheer if that were to happen, but in so far as today’s science can tell you, it cannot. The war against cancer is waged inch by inch, step by step, hammering away at that monstrous edifice. Tearing it down piece by piece, until one day, we will have to fear it no longer.

That day is far in the future. But progress is being made inexorably, and that progress is saving lives every year.

First off, about the blocking detachments: if the image in your head is Enemy at the Gates, dispel that image.

For one, even if nobody high enough in Soviet command to matter realized just how monumentally stupid that would be, fact is there weren’t enough ‘blocking detachments’ to do that. Per Order 227, three to five detachments of up to 200 men were to be founded within each army and assigned in the rear area of divisions suspected to be likely to break: it should be readily apparent that that’s not enough men to keep pulling Enemy at the Gates.

Instead, the blocking detachments operated in the same way as the rear area detachments of the German Feldgendarmerie: their purpose was to hunt combat units’ rear areas for malingerers, deserters, and units retreating or routing without orders. At which point, they had discretion in dealing with such personnel; but execution was rarely the first choice: the majority were returned to their units.

I do not think anyone ever made a full, complete study of exactly how many Soviet personnel were killed by the ‘blocking detachments’ specifically. Throughout the entire war, a total of 135.000 Soviet personnel were tried and executed by court martials: this number includes both proper, rear area military courts and more ‘drumhead’ style trials conducted in the field. Naturally, not all of these executions were the work of the blocking detachments, who were far from being the only disciplinary organization in the Soviet military: in fact, the blocking detachments were probably responsible for less than half of those, especially since this death toll is for court martials of all causes, including many disciplinary offences that did not fall on the blocking detachments to work against.

On the other hand, and I would like to highlight what I’m about to say is at best an educated guess, there almost certainly were a number of summary executions that should be added on that figure. It almost certainly wasn’t a high number, especially in comparison to the total of 135.000, but I’d expect a few thousand or so executions that did not make it into record for a total of about 140.000, give or take. Again, not all(and probably not the majority) were the work of the ‘blocking detachments’. But nobody, to the best of my knowledge, tried to compile exactly how many was carried out by the blocking detachments.

Usually, I prefer to not pass judgment on a book that I have not read. But in this case, I will make an exception.

First, let us quote from the book’s description, taken straight from its Barnes and Noble page[1]- I will not quote all of it, but two select pieces:

Although it is true that the six-million figure was declared to be the indubitable truth at this tribunal, it is actually remarkably older. This book shows that the six-million figure dates back to the late 1800s, when Jewish pressure groups were targeting czarist Russia for its anti-Jewish stance, accusing Russia of oppressing and persecuting the six million Jews in Russia, and adopting a “solution” to its “Jewish question” which allegedly consisted of outright extermination. Claims that six million Jews in Europe were suffering to such a degree that millions had died already, while many more millions would face a lingering death, climaxed for the first time during fundraising campaign that started during the FIRST World War and reached its peak in the early and mid-1920s. The New York Times was the main vehicle for such propaganda, which also included well-known buzzwords such as “annihilation,” “extermination” and even the term “holocaust.”

[…] Don Heddesheimer’s book reveals a Jewish-Zionist propaganda pattern that has been used since the late 1800s, first against czarist Russia, then in favor of the Soviet Revolution, next against Nazi Germany, and finally and ever since in favor of Israel.

At this point, you should probably be getting rather concerned about the exact message and claims this book is trying to push. But we’re just starting. Then, after reading the blurb, or probably before it, you notice the title and authors:

I do not think the name ‘Don Heddesheimer’ is famous anywhere except in connection to this book, but the name Germar Rudolf should be more familiar. He’s a German chemist who mostly became famous after a 1991 paper that essentially argued that a chemical analysis of cyanide compounds in Auschwitz’s gas chambers proved that no gassing could have taken place there. Obviously, his paper was scientifically a bust: it’s debatable whether he knew it was bullshit or sincerely believed he was correct, but nevertheless, Rudolf spent a few years peddling Holocaust denial, was convicted of Volksverhetzung in 1995, fled Germany to avoid arrest, was eventually extradited back to Germany by the US in 2005, served just over two years in prison, and returned to the US soon as he left prison.

Naturally, a book about the Holocaust the introduction of which was written by a noted Holocaust denier has to be… extra suspect.

But this isn’t all. Another answer to this question stated that the book’s publisher, Theses & Dissertations Press, pretty much publishes only Holocaust deniers. That answer is accurate in saying so, and this was going to be my next point, but while making sure I didn’t get anything wrong about Germar Rudolf, I found out more about that publisher. Turns out, it’s not surprising at all that Theses & Dissertations Press publishes Holocaust denial: it is founded by none other than Germar Rudolf himself, as an American outlet of Castle Hill Publishers, the publishing company Rudolf founded in Britain after he fled Germany to avoid arrest.

And indeed, Heddesheimer’s The First Holocaust is the sixth book in a 26-book ‘Holocaust Handbooks’ series published by Rudolf’s publishing companies. For the record, authors who wrote books in said series include Germar Rudolf himself, Jürgen Graf(Swiss Holocaust denier, living in exile in Moscow), Arthur Butz(American Holocaust denier and author of the book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century), Carlo Mattogno(Italian writer and editor of multiple major Holocaust denialist publications), Ingrid Weckert(most famous for blaming the Kristallnacht on Jews), and Fred Leuchert(author of the Leuchert Report, a Rudolfesque work of Holocaust denialism).

Yeah.

As I said, I’m not exactly fond of passing judgment on things I’ve not read. But looking at the book’s claims by the book’s own admission, the history of the man who wrote its introduction, the book’s publishing company, and the other books and authors Heddesheimer is rubbing elbows with, I think I can make an exception to my rule of not judging something before reading it, and state that The First Holocaust is, with no real room for doubt, a work of Holocaust denial, and as is typical of such works, has no real historical or academic value.

You’d probably be better off saving your money and time.

Footnotes

Unlikely.

Hitler had a very carefully constructed public image: and central to this public image was an appearance of ascetic behavior. The public image of Hitler was one wholly and completely dedicated to Germany and his political mission, with no interest in mortal and material indulgences. Propaganda and public relations portrayed him as a man of strikingly modest lifestyle, a chaste figure, one with neither interests nor love beyond his nation. Even his dress enforced this image of modesty- standing next to people like the bemedalled Göring, he dressed strikingly plain and with only, at most, his World War One decorations for ornament.

Although matters of feeling are hard to find evidence for, eyewitness accounts seem to indicate that Hitler genuinely loved Eva Braun: however, the desire to uphold that public image meant Hitler willingly hid that relationship from all but his innermost circle. In so far as most of Germany was concerned, Eva Braun did not exist, nor did her relationship with Hitler.

When stuck in his bunker, with his empire crumbling around him, the Soviet grasp around Berlin, and acutely aware of his death, Hitler realized his reputation and image ceased to matter. He married Eva Braun in the first hours of 29 April, with Bormann and Goebbels as witnesses, and less than two days later the couple killed themselves.

Had Germany won its war, Hitler’s image of modesty, celibacy and abstinence would have continued to matter, and thus, it’s likely Eva Braun would simply remain his lover.

In essence, the primary charge brought against Julius Streicher was Der Stürmer: the rabidly anti-Semitic tabloid he’d been responsible for publishing and editing for over twenty years since its first issue in April 1923.

It would perhaps be fitting to say that Der Stürmer was one of the most repulsive publications ever put to paper. It was gratuitously vulgar, explicit, unrepentantly hateful, and most importantly, from cover to cover bullshit: Streicher’s philosophy being that if he just spewed enough nonsense often enough, something would stick. The paper’s vulgarity and gratuitousness was such that even multiple leading Nazis themselves were disgusted by Streicher’s style: Schirach forbid Hitlerjugend personnel from reading it in the organization’s facilities, Göring did not permit his staff to read it, and Goebbels tried to outright ban it- of course, it stands to reason that they, especially Goebbels, probably had more of a problem with Der Stürmer’s style than with the purpose.

Hell, when Streicher started claiming Jewishness was inheritable by telegony(a failed theory of heredity that claimed an offspring could inherit traits of the female parent’s previous sexual partners), his claim got denounced by none other than the NSDAP Office of Racial Policy. Seriously, the more you read about Streicher, the more ridiculous it gets.

A group of people gathered before one of the Stürmerkasten: display boxes in which the most recent issue of Der Stürmer was prominently displayed for those that did not have the money to buy it or the time to read it cover to cover. Photo from the German federal archives.

But if so many leading Nazis were against Der Stürmer, how did it manage to continue to exist? Well, for the same reason Streicher managed to save his head from Göring’s rage after the former had an article published in Der Stürmer mocking Göring as impotent- and yes, he did that, too.

Hitler loved Streicher’s newspaper, and regarded the man as a loyal friend. This, combined with support from other prominent men like Himmler and Ley, kept Streicher operating, right up until the last issue of Der Stürmer in February 1945. Even the man’s incredibly odious personal behavior, so much so that he was judged unsuitable for leadership and stripped of his Party offices by the NSDAP’s Committee for Investigation and Settlement(in essence, the Party’s internal tribunal for its own internal affairs), didn’t turn Hitler off from Streicher.

The argument of the Nuremberg prosecution was that Streicher was such a rabid anti-Semite with such an audience, such a virulent hostility, and had played such a role in the spread of anti-Semitism in Germany, that he amounted to an accessory for murder and thus, complicit in it. On one hand, this was a bit of a stretch of international law- from a strictly legalistic point of view, it was a very sketchy sentence. On the other hand, if anyone ever deserved such a stretch in order to convict them, it was Julius Streicher. The man was as repulsive a creature as one could possibly think of, and regardless of the legal accuracy of his sentence the world became a better place when he swung.

The hangman for Streicher, along with the other death sentences given at Nuremberg, was a US soldier by the name of John Woods, who had previously served as executioner in a number of military hangings in France. Woods had gotten that job in France by claiming false past experience as a hangman: thus, he wasn’t particularly experienced in his job.

When time came for Streicher to hang, presumably because of Woods’ inexperience, things did not work out as they normally should in a hanging. Streicher’s neck did not snap, leaving him to choke beneath the platform.

One finds it difficult to muster up sympathy.

‘Defeated’ probably isn’t the accurate word here: certainly, the Polish military kept fighting long past two weeks after 1 September.

However, two weeks was how long it took for the Polish Army’s all large scale, operationally capable formations to be destroyed, encircled, or rendered ineffective. Poznan and Pomorze Armies were stuck in the Bzura Pocket where they would be annihilated during an attempted breakout. The remnants of the Modlin Army was besieged in Warsaw alongside half of the Narew Operational Group, the other half of which was encircled in Bialystok. The remnants of the Karpaty Army were encircled at Lwow. Krakow Army was pocketed east of the San. Prusy Army was wiped out at Radom, with shattered remnants joining the defense of Warsaw. Of the seven Polish armies at the start of the campaign, only the Lodz Army was somewhat intact, retreating towards Modlin where they would surrender near the end of the campaign.

Two weeks was the point where organized, nation-wide military resistance became impossible for the Polish military. After that, it became a dozen isolated redoubts and broken divisions, fighting desperately and fiercely, but fighting all alone, and doomed to defeat.

Make no mistake here, though. The two weeks may seem a dismal performance: but it needs to be placed in context. For the Wehrmacht, this campaign wasn’t akin to the 1940 French campaign or any of the great operations of the Eastern Front. The German military went into Poland with a degree of material and resource superiority that, save the Balkan campaign of 1941, it would never again have at any front during any major operation. The Polish army, partly mobilized, ill prepared and strung out across a border far too long for them to hope to defend, was facing a military that was more numerous, better equipped, better prepared, and in a not insignificant number of cases better led at the highest echelons.

Right from the very first day, the Polish military was facing an uphill battle it had no hope of winning. Yet, while the overall course of the campaign turned into total catastrophe in a matter of days, at the divisional and regimental level Polish soldiers achieved miracles. At Mlawa, Hel Peninsula, Wizna and many other places they held out and pushed back against great odds.

The speed of the German victory against Poland is often used to disparage the Polish performance in their country’s defense. And while much criticism can be levied against the Polish defense plan as was decided at the highest level of command, which was characterized by a shocking overconfidence in the Polish military’s capabilities, I feel the aforementioned disparagement makes a great disservice to the individuals who fought in the Polish military in 1939.

Faced with the horrifying task of fighting a war against nearly every kind of military and material superiority and with only their own talent, grit and sheer determination to compensate, the Polish soldier fought as good as any human being could possibly be expected to. In fact, that the Polish military had effectively crumbled to little pieces fighting on their own in two weeks only speaks highly of the degree of Polish resolve, for normally, when a nation’s army is splintered to pieces in two weeks and stuffed in countless pockets, one expects such pockets to surrender en masse, seeing further resistance to be pointless. Yet many of such pockets did no such thing; isolated redoubts fought on, day after day, week after week, sometimes all the way to October. Warsaw and Modlin surrendered only in the last days of September. The broken remnants of the Krakow Army east of the San lasted well over a week of encirclement. The few thousand men in the Hel Peninsula only gave up in October.

But unfortunately for Poland, talent, grit and determination, no matter how abundant, can only make up for so much.

The length of the Polish resistance, in essence, has two meanings. On one hand, it is an indictment of the Polish high command, whose ill-preparedness and overconfidence helped fatally compromise the defensive plan on which their country’s survival relied. On the other hand, it’s a glowing crown of accomplishment on the individuals who fought in the ranks of the Polish army, whose sheer tenacity and resolve was the sole reason the Polish campaign extended as far as five weeks.

They fought harder than anyone could ask them to. Those men can hold their heads high in the afterlife.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw. Once part of the Saxon Palace, it now stands alone, after the rest of the palace was demolished by German sappers after the Warsaw Uprising. Only the Tomb itself was not touched. The Tomb honours Polish war dead in battles dating back to the 972 Battle of Cedynia. Of the nineteen tables that stand there, two are dedicated to battles of the 1939 campaign.

There are two reasons why Mein Kampf reads as a fairly incoherent work.

One, Hitler wasn’t a particularly good author. Writing and oratory are different arts: Hitler’s exceptional talent at the latter did not translate well to the former. Even if one is to disregard the repulsiveness of many of the ideas present in it, the book itself is dull and lacking in coherence- it’s a fairly raw outpouring of Hitler’s thoughts and emotions and feelings, without much structure and order to it. Such style may lend itself well to literary fiction, but not to a political manifesto, and fails to leave behind an impression of coherent vision.

But the second reason is… well, you’re right. Dead on. None of Hitler’s racial theories make sense, nor do most of his political theories.

Hitler’s theories on race make sense only if you take as axiomatic the root points from which they stemmed: the pervasive obsession with race and racial superiority/inferiority that was so frighteningly common in Europe, especially among certain political circles. And today, those root points are, thankfully, regarded as the nonsense they were. The entire ideal is built upon rotten roots, and we today recognize those roots as rotten- thankfully, as if those ideas had been recognized as what they were in their day, the world would be a better place.

Hitler’s racial and political theories were built on the idea of the absolute superiority and inferiority of certain races, and of the inferior races presenting a mortal danger to their superiors. To him and to so many of his contemporaries, that nonsensical idea was absolute truth, on which their entire views were founded.

To us, who thankfully have shed that vile idea, Hitler’s entire racial worldview suddenly ceases to have its roots. It’s left in the air. It does not make sense. When you look at Hitler’s racial theories in Mein Kampf, it looks incomplete, made up, precisely because their roots are a set of beliefs that Hitler took as axiomatic, beliefs that today are rightly regarded as having neither factual accuracy nor moral standing. When read by one that does not share Hitler’s fundamental view on race, the entire thing seems built on foundations that, let alone being lackluster, do not even exist.

You think Mein Kampf doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t. Congratulations. That is exactly what the book is: an amateurishly written, incoherent manifesto built upon failed ideas.

It depended on if the marriage happened after 17 September 1935, with the passing of a clarification for the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, itself passed and entered force two days before that.

The aforementioned law contained an explicit ban for any marriages between Jews and ‘Aryan’ Germans- the violation of which was punishable by prison with hard labour. Any children who were born from such a marriage officiated after 17 September 1935 were legally ruled as Jewish, and were thus subject to any and every form of persecution the Reich later chose to enact on their Jewish citizens- including death. In so far as the Third Reich concerned, that child was Jewish: no thought was spared to the presence of a German parent.

The law was not retroactively applied, however: thus, any children born from such a marriage officiated before said date were ruled as Mischlinge ersten Grades: a first-degree ‘mixed’. The Mischlinge suffered their own persecutions, but they would at least be spared extermination.

There were no plans for the existence of an independent, or even somewhat autonomous, Poland.

The ‘General Government for the occupied Polish region’ didn’t exist as a prelude to a Polish puppet state- far from it. The reason it was a separate territory, that was not just folded into Germany like the rest of Poland was, was the near-nonexistence of a significant German minority within its borders- for the region’s proper integration into Germany, a period of transition, Germanization and repression was deemed necessary. In essence, it was no different than a Reichskommissariat.

At no point throughout the occupation of Poland did the Germans seriously entertain the thought of any restoration of Polish statehood. It’s not like they didn’t have the opportunity to set up such a structure- they had, and Germany treated those opportunities with utter disregard. Presumably, if the Germans had any interest whatsoever in Polish statehood, they would’ve been somewhat receptive when Wladyslaw Studnicki, noted Polish politician known for his pro-German and anti-Communist stance, kept trying again and again to make such a thing happen, including proposing a recreation of the Polish army to assist in the war with the Soviet Union.

Let alone showing any interest in Studnicki, Germans eventually arrested him. Twice.

The above is the text of the Proclamation of Governor General dated October 1939, announcing the establishment of German authority across all of Poland that was not given to the Soviets.

Generally, when a country is occupied, it is in the interest of the occupiers that the occupied expect lenience and benevolent treatment: thus, the kind of public announcements and claims made by those occupying forces aimed at public consumption tend to be… less than honest. This, certainly, was true of announcements like the above: there’s certainly multiple pretenses at generous behavior there that history would soon show to be lies. The sentence ‘you should be allowed to retain your Polish character’ reads especially like the bald-faced lie that it was, considering the events that happened in the years that followed.

And thus, it’s particularly illuminating to see the phrase ‘des ehemaligen landes Polen’, ‘of the former country of Poland’, in this announcement. If that’s not enough, in the next sentence is also the description ‘a state that was once built on the Versailles truce and will never be reborn’.

Note: this is an announcement made in occupied Poland, its intended audience being Poles, designed to improve cooperation and collaboration with the occupying forces by way of a mix of promises and threats. And even here, Hans Frank states flatly that Poland is to never be a state again.

Presumably, if the Germans weren’t even willing to falsely promise a return of Polish statehood in a publication aimed entirely to making Poles not cause trouble, they had no intent whatsoever to actually permit Poland its independence. Let alone independence, it was highly unlikely for Poles as a nation to be permitted existence.

He’d be hanged.

Ley would likely be acquitted of the first out of the three charges brought against him- the famous ‘conspiracy charge’ proved particularly difficult to make stick at Nuremberg, with eleven defendants who were found guilty of other charges being acquitted of it.

However, Ley’s other two charges, of war crimes and crimes against humanity, would definitely stick. It wasn’t Ley who was the reason behind the existence of countless slave workers that fueled the German war economy, as the provision of labour was the responsibility of Fritz Sauckel. But although Ley wasn’t the person finding these workers, he was the one responsible for their management and treatment- and thus, one of the primary actors guilty of the dismal treatment of the forced laborers in Germany.

Sauckel was hanged for his ready provision of slave labor for the German industries: certainly, Ley wasn’t going to get any more lenient a sentence for being in charge of their dismal treatment, and didn’t deserve one either. Once he was in the Nuremberg prison, the only way he was getting out was through the noose- the only thing that changed was that he managed to become his own hangman.

And if he had abstained from suicide long enough to get his own death sentence, it’d certainly be one he deserved.

Ley, shortly after his capture by American troops in Bavaria. The title of the image, ‘Strength Through Joy’, refers to the German Kraft durch Freude program, a state-run leisure and tourism organization that had been Ley’s responsibility until it ceased to operate after the start of the war.

It was common- maybe not as common as it is today, but the seeming near-nonexistence of cancer in that list is due to the following:

• Cancer more commonly crops up in older ages than the younger, and the more people die to something else, the fewer grow old enough to get cancer. 14th century had a far shorter life expectancy than today, largely due to a whole host of infectious diseases we can safely treat and prevent today, and every single person who died to those is someone who did not grow old enough to develop cancer.
• An extension of the above, if there’s something that kills a lot of people quickly, it’s probably also going to kill many people who have cancer, before they die of cancer.
• Furthermore, if there’s something that kills a lot of people very quickly, it’s going to reduce every other cause of death to smaller ‘percentages’, even if nothing changes vis-a-vis their prevalence. If nobody in that list had died of plague, the rate of ‘cancer deaths’ among deaths would suddenly become eight times what it is counting plague deaths.
• A lack of adequate diagnosis. Many cancers would be impossible to identify in the 14th century, and others would require thorough autopsy which I doubt was particularly common at the time. There are 309 people who died from fever- some of them may have been, say, suffering from lymphoma, whose most distinctive symptom would be fever. Needless to say, lymphoma started being diagnosed only with the rise of microscopy and histology as a field of medicine in the 19th century. ‘Griping in the guts’ would refer to severe abdominal discomfort- that could be a symptom of countless gastrointestinal system cancers. Five of jaundice? Could be hepatobiliary cancers. Convulsion? Could be caused by metastasis of cancer to the central nervous system. Consumption? Traditionally refers to pulmonary tuberculosis- but some might well be misdiagnosed lung cancer.

However, many cancers indeed would have been less common in the past, as they are associated with risk factors that weren’t present at the time. The single greatest risk factor for lung cancer, for example, is smoking- tobacco smoking spread in England only in the sixteenth century. Past pregnancies are protective against endometrial cancer- likely, endometrial cancer was less common in times where pregnancy rates were higher. Lung mesothelioma is almost exclusive to asbestos exposure- certainly, it would be less common before the mass use of asbestos in the 19th century.

On the other hand, other cancers were more common in the past, as their risk factors were more prevalent in the past. For example, scrotal carcinoma was much more common in 18th century London, when work as chimney sweeps(especially as children) was highly prevalent.

However, cancer is, in no way, a modern disease- it only took this long to properly understand, identify and treat most forms of cancer.

I’ll start by saying this. Holy shit I did not see this coming.

I rarely write or talk on US politics- or politics at all, especially these days compared to a few years ago. Those that saw me write on it, however, probably realize I’ve, vis-a-vis my position on the American political spectrum, had a quite peculiar experience: although possessed of a set of political beliefs fairly distant from both of the mainstream American ideologies, I used to semi-regularly bounce between having sympathy for the Republicans and for the Democrats until finally giving up on it, as I’ve seen the cesspool the whole political arena became, save for a few people on either side who held on to integrity.

From the Democrat and the Republican sides and from many of the sub-factions within those I’ve seen varying degrees of repulsive behaviour, from hatred to hysteria, in degrees that far outnumbered the voices of sanity(the representatives of those voices of sanity on Quora, you know who you are and my respect for you in that regard). In sum, I like to believe my distaste for the American politics is well-founded. Yet, simultaneously, when I’ve heard the typical doom-and-gloom pictures of ruin the factions of American politics paint about the consequences of the opposing side’s triumphs, I have regularly seen gross exaggerations in them. And in seeing such panic as exaggerated, I have always been right.

Until right fucking now.

The iconic image of the Capitol swarmed by a mob, by Leah Millis of the Reuters.

Certainly, I wasn’t going to be surprised at all if Trump’s electoral defeat was met by protest. Even if said protests turned violent, I would have reacted to it with calm- for I would have foreseen it might have occurred. But I did not see this coming.

This isn’t protest. At this point, even ‘violent protest’ is too little. This is sedition.

Sure, it did start as a protest. As long as what this group did was to gather before the Capitol and shout their opposition to the electoral results, they were entirely within their rights to do so- even if their point was nonsensical. But that was not all they did. The moment they breached the Capitol perimeter and proceeded to vandalize the seat of the Congress, the epithet of ‘protest’ goes away.

It’s unacceptable that this even happened. But even more unacceptable is the response. While the flimsy security cordon around the Capitol was being breached, it fell to state governors to deploy elements of their National Guard into DC. DC’s own National Guard? It took one and a half hours for an order summoning it to the Capitol to be signed… by Mike Pence. Not President Trump, who certainly was in the position to do it, and had the duty to do it, but… didn’t. There are few political views in the American mainstream which I would disagree with as much as Pence’s, but even he at least signed the bloody order to send in the Guard!

I was at shock watching the events unfold. Every time, whenever they were tossed out, whether by Republicans or Democrats, I had always seen gross exaggeration and doomsaying in foretellings of futures like this. Every time I was right. Until this happened. I could sit here and claim that I had foreseen such a thing, but I’d be lying. I didn’t.

But I can tell you one thing. This cannot be allowed to stand.

By my personal book, this borders perilously close to high treason. It is not by US law, but I’m pretty sure it is, at the very least, insurrection, and it needs to be treated as such. And it can’t stop with the mob- it shouldn’t. Mobs are easy to control. With the right words, right emotions and right prodding they can be driven to almost everything.

There’s people responsible for those words and prodding. More severely, there’s people responsible for the absolutely lackluster response to this. While state governors mobilized to the Capitol’s defense, the very president to which such mission is entrusted did nothing- no, it would be better had he done nothing. He’s pretty clearly encouraged it. The most charitable interpretation would label Trump with a massive lack of foresight concerning the impact of his own actions and a total lack of will to respond appropriately to the consequences this brought about. And I don’t know about you, but right now I’m not feeling awfully charitable.

There is no room left for partisan loyalties in this issue- such loyalties plagued America for long enough, and in a matter this severe they can no longer be tolerated. It was two state governors that sent their National Guard into DC., one a Republican, one a Democrat. I know nothing about those governors, except that they were willing to do what was necessary in this moment of crisis. Take example. The people responsible for this cannot receive a slap on the wrist and walk out because of partisan loyalties. The tradition in the US of people excusing away loathsome or even criminal activities because it was done by ‘their side’ is certainly not new, and both sides have certainly been guilty of it in the past. But this is a whole new level. Loathsome though that past precedent was and despicable though I found it, the event it’s culminated in surpasses the excesses of the past. It must be stopped here.

It’s a warning call against the consequences of partisan fidelity over loyalty to the nation. A warning call for everyone: for every Republican with integrity it’s a call to clean their own house, God knows it needs cleaning- and although nothing this egregious has come from the other side of the aisle, it’s a warning for the Democrats too, to be vigilant against themselves and learn their lessons from the catastrophic last days of the Trump presidency and the events that led to it. I don’t want to see this repeating fifteen years later with the parties switched.

And here, for the first time, I’m going to make a ‘doom and gloom’ prediction myself: unless this is met with the appropriate response, worse will happen. This is insurrection. It must be treated as insurrection- with requisite severity.

Listen to Lincoln. A house divided against itself cannot stand. That house is once again divided, and stands on a precipice. And if insurrection ends up excused away, if its enablers and participants get ignored or forgotten because of party lines, worse than this assault upon the Capitol will happen. If insurrection goes away excused because of the political identity of the insurrectionists, then the house plummets from the precipice and the US will not like where it ends up.

And trust me on this. If I’m being the doomsayer, that’s a warning sign.